Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Crafty Christmas – Dictionary Page Ornaments

So as I’ve mentioned previously, I participated in my very first craft sale this past weekend. I worked really hard to build up an inventory of awesome Christmas crafts and decorations – things that I was really proud of. I was up until 2 the night before the sale putting the finishing touches on things and I was very pleased with my 8 foot table piled with Christmas goodness. So you can imagine my extreme disappointment when I sold almost nothing! The good news is that I don’t think it was my fault. We got a lot of snow the night before the sale and the roads were a mess in the morning which meant not a lot of people came. So now I have a bunch of boxes full of Christmas crafts in my basement but I also have a lot of great projects to share with you. First up are super simple Dictionary Page Ornaments.

I bought a bunch of Styrofoam balls at the dollar store and decided to turn them into “unbreakable” ornaments. Basically, ornaments that would be safe should your toddler decide to throw them or your cat decide to climb your tree (I’ve lost many an ornament to my cat’s antics). For this project I chose balls that were a bit bigger than a ping pong ball.

I started by tearing up pages of an old dictionary into small squares and strips. Then I applied a layer of Mod Podge to the balls and covered them in the dictionary pieces, overlapping them to make sure nothing would show through. This is the point where it got messy – I then applied a generous amount of Mod Podge to the top of the dictionary pages and used my fingers to really rub it in and smooth everything out. My hands were black when I was through!

To dry the ornaments I set them in an old egg carton so that they wouldn’t stick to each other or anything else. Once they were dry I used straight pins to attach a loop of red ribbon for hanging. And voila – Dictionary Page Ornaments. I think they turned out simple and pretty and I was selling them for $2 or 3 for $5. I got a ton of compliments but I didn’t sell any. Oh well, they just might make it onto our tree this year ;)

Making sure you keep checking back as I’ve got a lot more Crafty Christmas posts coming up!